The present invention relates to a control apparatus such as a control board for controlling various manufacturing machine equipment.
Recently, manufacturing machine equipment have been becoming more and more complicated and diversified. At the same time, a high level of sequential processing or data processing has been demanded for the control boards which control the machine equipment, and an external control means such as a programmable sequential controller has been used for sequential processing.
Generally, a control board is provided with an operating panel and a sequential controller which controls the machine equipment in a sequential manner according to predetermined operations on the basis of operating data input from the operating panel and detection signals provided from the machine equipment and which causes the operating panel to display the status of operation of the machine equipment.
In such a conventional control board, however, a dedicated operating panel has been fabricated for each piece of machine equipment to be sequential-controlled, and therefore a part or the entire operating panel must be replaced at every change of the object or contents of sequential control.